Dive Brief:
- A recent study linked consuming beverages containing low-calorie sweeteners with healthier diets and lower calorie consumption overall. The journal Nutrients published the study earlier this year, which Splenda featured in a news release this week.
- Researchers noticed higher-quality diets among non-consumers (NC) of sugary-sweetened beverages and consumers of low-calorie beverages (LCB) compared to consumers of sugary-sweetened beverages (SSB) or consumers of both sugar-sweetened and low-calorie beverages.
- The study's findings also suggest that NC and LCB consumers tend to not consume other sugary foods as a way to compensate for less sugar or energy intake. That's even though their nearly equivalent daily calorie intake (1718 kcal/day and 1719 kcal/day, respectively) was significantly less than SSB consumers (1958 kcal/day) and consumers of both SSB and LCB (1986 kcal/day).
Dive Insight:
This study's results could be big news for diet soda companies, but is it too little too late? As more consumers veer toward "healthy" rather than "diet" products and concerns about artificial sweeteners increase, diet soda brands have taken a hit in recent years.
That's left companies like PepsiCo scrambling. The beverage and snacks giant recently announced it would be bringing back its aspartame-sweetened version of Diet Pepsi after consumer backlash followed the brand's reformulation to replace aspartame with sucralose. However, the move isn't quite a "New Coke" snafu, as PepsiCo isn't pulling sucralose-sweetened Diet Pepsi altogether. The sucralose version will remain in the traditional Diet Pepsi silver packaging, while PepsiCo will release the aspartame-sweetened version as "Diet Pepsi Classic Sweetener Blend" in light blue packaging.
Artificial sweetener producer Splenda is promoting the results of this study as nutrition research that supports consumption of products made with its sucralose sweetener. Food Dive reached out for confirmation whether Splenda or its parent company Heartland Food Products Group had provided funding for the study, and the brand confirmed they had not.
This demonstrates a way that manufacturers can still use nutrition research to their advantage when promoting products. Instead of funding the research itself, which may raise questions, manufacturers can stay on top of the latest research from nutrition and medical journals and adapt those findings to their marketing messages, as Splenda did here. Still, manufacturers will have to be weary of cherry-picking research findings, which is a concern for industry-funded research.
If Splenda or Heartland had contributed funding for the research, it could have been yet another study questioned by public health advocates who are concerned whether bias and vested interest skew results in the funding company's favor.